Dean's Blog

We live in a world where talk of the US News Rankings dominates the conversation about law school quality. We all know that the US News rankings are seriously flawed yet we continue to participate and many law schools tout their US News rankings at every opportunity. No one seriously suggests (except for the folks that make lots of money off the rankings) that the US News Rankings are any measure of the quality of a law school.

We have welcomed 3 students from the Norwich Law School at the University of East Anglia into the Cumberland community. The three students who hail from Dartford, Essex and London will be taking classes with us for a year. This is the third year of our participation in an exchange program with Norwich. Pursuant to our agreement with Norwich, Cumberland students are provided scholarships to pursue LL.M. degrees at Norwich in International Law and Business related programs. There are two Cumberland students currently studying at Norwich.

This is always an exciting time of the year at the law school. Classes have started and our second and third year students have returned. It is a real joy for me to hear about their summer experiences. For me, it also marks a return to teaching. In the first semester, I co-teach a mediation practice course along with Cassandra Adams, the Director of our Cumberland Community Mediation Project. The course teaches our students to be mediators which gives them an inside look at the mediation process. I also teach an on-line course entitled e-Discovery and Evidence.

On Monday, the class of 2011 arrived at the law school. This year's class continues our trend of enrolling intentionally smaller size classes of students with diverse backgrounds. The 162 members of the class come from 17 different states including Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, New Mexico, Texas and Utah. Alabama continues to be our largest feeder state but there are also significant numbers of students from Georgia, Florida and Tennessee. The class has an average LSAT of 156 and an average GPA of 3.24

As I have mentioned to many of you when we have been together, it is important that our faculty be recognized as scholars as well as exceptional teachers. That is why we encourage our faculty to participate in programs outside the law school

Several of our faculty were featured at the recently completed meeting of the Southeastern Association of Law Schools which was held in Palm Beach, Florida. (I am sure that the location had nothing to do with the outstanding faculty participation).